Weeping Into Your Controller
A company called Bowen Research has published a report (and it can be yours for only a thousand bucks!) about the emotional impact of video games.
The puff article about the report included the following "Kids these days!" nugget:
[T]wo-thirds of all gamers think games exceed, could exceed or could equal the emotional richness of other major forms of art and entertainment:I was thinking about a similar issue of narrative a few days ago: Can games or interactive stories ever exceed film's ability to present compelling dramatic narrative?Games already are beyond books, movies and music in inspring emotion ... 9%
Games could go beyond them ... 32%
Games could equal them ... 27%
My initial take on this boils down to "No." Here's my theory:
I think there's a basic contradiction between an interactive medium, where by definition the player decides what happens in the story, and a compelling narrative, which wraps the viewer up in an emotional state of hope vs. fear where the audience hopes for one outcome and fears another — usually opposite — outcome.
In an interactive story, I can't think of a way to balance hope for one thing and fear of another with the ability for the player to simply decide what happens. Won't the player simply make a choice that aligns with his hope, and shun choices that align with the fear, and thereby simply dismiss his involvement with the story?
Placing obstacles along the road to achieving what's hoped for — monsters, puzzles, what-have-you — is the obvious solution. Grossly simplifying, the player hopes to overcome the obstacles, fears that he won't. Pretty much all the games you can slot into your PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube these days have some variant of that going for them. But since the solutions to all of these obstacles are mechanical rather than emotional (you mash the buttons to overcome the obstacle rather than growing psychologically as a protagonist), it seems to me that the resulting reward also can't hope to exceed the mechanical. Which is precisely what we see in most console and computer games: The reward for success is a power-up, which helps you overcome increasingly difficulty mechanical challenges, ad nauseum.
Might you weep into your controller in frustration after the 427th time you've failed to beat Level Whatever in First-person Shooter #626? You might well. Is that emotion in gaming? Not so much.
There's obviously a lot more Deep Thinking to be done in this area. Might the dramatic tension in an interactive story arise from some emotional state other than hope vs. fear? Might the evolved gameplay and mechanics of the future better simulate the protagonist psyche's potential for growth in a game-story? Might I be overblowing this whole hope and fear business?
"Perhaps" to all these questions. But that's Deep Thinking for some other day.
Comments
When you're between the ages of 18 and 25 and you're at a party with a lot of your parents' friends, you get a lot of well intentioned but meaningless advice. ("One word. Plastics.") When people who otherwise didn't know me from Adam learned that I was in film school and I knew something about computers they all said, "Ohhh. Ahhhh! Then you're poised at the perfect juncture, since in five years all movies will be immersive virtual reality stories in which the audience directs the action via a computer keypad." And I always said, "Dear Lord, I hope to hell not."
You're absolutely right that interactive stories would destroy the narrative experience of film. To say nothing of the havoc that would be wreaked upon the momentum and creative continuity of: actors' performances, the musical score, etc. Moreover, lazy screenwriters and/or directors would just be shrugging off the tough decisions to the audience. Do the castaways go down the hatch now, or do they wait at camp until sunrise? As the storyteller, it's your job to choose the most compelling answer and craft an interesting and meaningful reason for the story to take that path. Handing that decision over to the audience is basically saying, "Eh. I can't be bothered to pick. Here's five endings, you choose one." It's a terrible practice in interface design, and even worse in storytelling. If audiences wrote movies while they watched them, it would represent the ultimate capitulation to the focus group/test screening mentality, and the art would suffer gravely for it.
But if you want to make video games more filmic, I'm all for it. I think you can set up choices that are more emotional than "I hope this bullet fells the baddie; I fear it won't" because there are plenty of non-mechanical decisions in life that are still difficult. Should I break up my best friend's wedding, or let go of my feelings for her? The challenge is to put enough emotional weight into the choices, so that there is a real struggle in the mind of the player - off the top of my head, this would probably mean longer cutscenes with more of a story arc to them, so the player/viewer is more invested in the characters and understands the pros and cons of those decisions.
I think you're right: that there are many non-mechanical choices in life, and that the difficulty is in putting that emotional emphasis on the choices the player must make in the game.
From what I hear from friends who work in the console business, cut scenes are pretty widely viewed as an irritation and ignored by most serious gamers.
Me, I tend to like them, though I usually wish that, in general, they were better edited, and had better ADR so I could actually understand what was being said over the sound effects.
Well yeah, my hope was that these cutscenes would be so integral to the game play (emotionally) that they'd be less irksome to players.
I myself like cutscenes in games, but I hate when all the really cool footage from the TV ad ends up being from the cutscenes and the actual gameplay graphics are much crummier!